High quality audio recording
Let me begin by telling you a bit about myself. My name is Dan Hauck and at the moment, I do most of the audio recording here. I've done multi-track recording as a profession for over 20 years and for 30 years before that I did live to two-track & single track (Yes, I'm older than dirt but still can hear & see a little). I've been a performing professional musician (electric bass) since 1965. My first 10 years were spent in cover bands playing top-40 music of the time, which was probably the most varied assortment of music that has ever existed simultaneously in North America. When you learn that way, you unconsciously absorb a huge assortment of musical genres and learn from the greatest intuitive musicians and arrangers who have ever lived. The following 30 years I've played mostly with people who either wrote original music or performed radical arrangements that necessitated me composing my own bass lines. I've also worked as a studio musician for over 20 years. I know what I'm talking about & will not knowingly lie to you.
The first question people usually ask is "How much is this going to cost?" The answer is much more up to you than to me. I sell time, and unlike many of my peers, I don't like for things to take a long time even though in theory it would make me more money. I'm not participating in the competition to be the cheapest recording engineer in the area, only the best. To that end, I'm going to tell you some things that will enable you to make the most of your recording experience and get you the most bang you can get for your buck. FYI, keep in mind that anyone who claims to be able to help your career because he or she "has connections in the music business" and then wants you to give him or her money is probably lying. Anyone who truly believes in you and has these connections will not ask you for money (or any other kind of favors) up front. He will want a percentage of what you'll make if & when you do begin to make money. Therefore, it's in his interest to do all he can to further your career. And by all means, talk to an entertainment attorney before you sign ANYTHING. So now, down to business.*
75% of the quality of any recording is the quality of the performance. The most famous recording engineer in the world with a billion dollars worth of equipment cannot make anything but a mediocre product from a mediocre performance. On the other hand, a trained raccoon could hold up a cell phone and get a remarkable recording of a stellar performance. So first, let's work on your performance. If you're classically trained most of the following will be old hat, but read it anyway. You might accidentally learn something. Performance has many facets. You must have a well-written song that is arranged well and played well and the easiest way to get one of these is to borrow or "cover" a song that has been previously recorded by someone elsewho is at least moderately well known. That way you're much more likely to start out with a song that has been written, arranged and performed by people who knew what they were doing. No need to try & re-invent the wheel at this point. Before you try to learn it, listen to it extensively & try to figure out what makes it work well. Listen to it until you've memorized every note. Then try to pick out your part by ear EXACTLY. Don't do the big ego thing & pooh-pooh this exercise because short of getting a masters degree in music composition this is the only way you'll ever learn songwriting, arranging & performance. I particularly recommend covering a song of a style that you don't particularly like. In my case, I spent a year playing five nights a week in a band that did BOTH kinds of music, Country AND Western and spent at least the first few months annoyed at the simplicity and repetitive nature of much of the music, but as time passed I began to appreciate it as minimalist art and a very highly disiplined form of art at that. I came away as a much better bass player after that year. I often hear musicians disparaging some type of music that they don't understand, but if you hate Bluegrass, Blues, Country, Polka or whatever, try playing any one or all & I think you'll find out that those genres are much more sophisticated than you might suspect from a cursory listen. This isn't a recommendation to record cover music (unless you're doing a radical re-arrangement or a vanity recording), the cover song has already been recorded but it is an EXTREMELY valuable type of practice that will really pay dividends in your performance ability.
1) Whatever is your instrument, get it in good shape. If you're a guitarist Get new strings & make sure your instrument is properly set up by a competent technician. I can't overstress the importance of this. For example, if you play a stringed instrument such as a guitar, if the instrument isn't properly set up it will only play in tune at one spot on the neck and will sound progressively farther out of tune the farther you get from that position. If you're a guitarist & don't have a real acoustic guitar, GET ONE. And I don't mean a thin-line acoustic-electric that plays like an electric, I mean a REAL dreadnought acoustic guitar. If you can't play your music competently & expressively on a real acoustic guitar without amplification, you can't play. I'm really serious here. If you're a guitar player, practice on an acoustic guitar will improve your technique ENORMOUSLY. If you have effects units or any other electronic device & you think they make you sound better, try practicing without them. If an electronic device makes you sound better to yourself, you'll never get any better than you were when you started using it. You also are very likely to run into gain structure problems with effects units that will increase the noise level in your sound to the point that the noise begins to obscure detail. To my ear, the only really pleasing guitar distortion is the distortion that comes from overdriving a class-A tube amplifier until the power amp distorts. My dislike of effects units comes from working with "musicians" who used racks of outboard gear in an effort to avoid doing the work that is, unfortunately, necessary to actually play well. Sound doesn't come from an electronic device, it comes from your hands. Let's find an example...Led Zeppelin I. How many stacks of Marshalls did it take to get what is arguably the best guitar sound ever recorded and what effects did Jimmy Page have plugged into them? Answer: None. He played a Telecaster into a tiny Supro amp that was perhaps 5 watts. Case closed.
2) GET A METRONOME! Practice with it. If you find this exercise difficult, it means you can't keep time. You don't necessarily have to record with it, but take my word for it...your music will sound better if you can keep time and if you can't play easily & expressively to a metronome YOU CAN'T KEEP TIME! Good time isn't a God-given talent, it's a skill that has to be practiced. Believe me, I've heard all the excuses...My music has to breathe, if I play with a metronome it will make my playing mechanical, yadda yadda yadda. In my experience, if you can't keep good time, your recording will suck. This is especially true if you plan on doing overdubs. If the time on the initial tracks isn't rock-solid, the recording will progressively become a train-wreck as more tracks are added. If you're planning on recording and availing yourself of all the capabilities inherent in hard-disk recording, it's pretty nigh essential that you learn how to play with a click track. A tremendous added benefit of practicing with a metronome is that it will very quickly help you to learn how to reach the meditative state where your hands seem to work by themselves. ALL musicians strive to get into "the zone" but far too many think that one achieves this state through the use of psychoactive substances and nothing could be further from the truth. Trust me. Practicing with metronome will really help you to learn how to get into "the zone". And no psychoactive substance will make your playing anything but worse. I'm not speaking simply of illegal psychoactive substances either. Some of the worst psychoactive substances as far as your playing is concerned are the legal ones, particularly coffee, alcohol and nicotine. Both coffee and alcohol distort your perception of time & will make timekeeping difficult if not impossible. Alcohol also interferes with your judgement and prevents you from accurately analyzing your own performance. Just as alcohol will make you see a person of the opposite gender as more attractive than he or she really is the next morning, so will alcohol make your musical performance seem more brilliant than it actually was in the harsh light of the next day. An interesting phenomenon that I've noticed many time thru the years is that a musician's ability to hear himself is inversely proportional to the amount of alcohol consumed both live and in the studio. Those of you who have experienced alcohol know that it numbs your nervous system as far as pain is concerned. That's why in the movies the cowboy takes a few gulps of whiskey before Doc probes for the bullet. If alcohol numbs you to pain, I guarantee that it numbs your auditory nerves, too. As for nicotine, nicotine in any form will ultimately steal whatever musical gift you have. It will ruin your voice and because it acts as a powerful vasoconstrictor, it kills nerve tissue & will destroy your hearing, your balance and your eyesight a tiny bit at a time. Eventually it will kill you.
3) Practice with the least equipment you can as quietly as possible. If you practice with a full PA system including monitors, you're practicing too damned loud. The louder you practice, the less good it does you. When you play music, you're communicating energy by building & releasing tension. This is done by changing dynamics (volume) and changing the way time works within a song. Since loudness and fast playing both seem to communicate more energy, it's easy to fall into the trap of playing as loud and as fast as you can all the time, but this simply doesn't work. It's actually very tiring to listen to. You must vary the dynamics to have both tension & release and the varying of tempo has to take place within the beat by playing either ahead of or behind the beat or the song will just keep speeding up, and again, no tension & release. And you can't play ahead of or behind the beat unless you know where the beat is, and unless you've practiced intensively with a metronome, you can't possibly know where the beat is.
4) Record yourself. This doesn't have to be anything elaborate. Anything that will record in stereo will do, from a cassette boom box to any one of the portable hand-held recorders that range in price from $80 on up. Set it up in what would be the best listening spot in the room (use your head) & hit "record". Then listen to yourself the next day & note the things that need work. It's a lot cheaper than buying time from me only to listen to the result & find out what needs work. The machine doesn't know how to lie. You can get caught up in the moment & think you were playing with tremendous energy, but if you listen the next day & the music is monotonous, it was monotonous when you played it.
5) Pop Quiz
At this point, I like to administer what I refer to as The Big Ego Test.
Question One: (T or F) I think I'm really, really, really good.
If the answer is (T), go listen to some Mozart...any Mozart, for 20 minutes & then retest. If the answer is still (T), you need to get a grip on your ego. Face it. Even the best of us is only a ditch-digger compared to Mozart. There's no dishonor in this. Just work on digging the best ditch you can.
Question Two: Why are you doing this (This being playing, performing and by extension, recording music)?
A) I love playing & performing music & I think I would die if I couldn't do it.
B) I want to get rich and famous.
If your answer is A, keep it up. If you work at it you'll always be improving & bringing enjoyment to yourself & others. You'll never be disappointed. If your answer is B, give up. Your odds are astronomically better with lottery tickets. It doesn't matter how gifted you are or how much you really want or deserve fame and fortune. The music business is an evil, dirty business and it feeds on the dreams of people just like you. There are people standing in line that are more than happy to steal your money & your talent who will tell you ANYTHING.
6) Philosophy of Recording I have a very sincere belief that above & beyond all else, I should be transparent. I don't think I have a "signature sound" to give you. I only want to make you sound as much like yourself as is humanly possible. I don't think Bob Dylan would be improved by pitch-correction software. To that end, I DO NOT OWN PITCH-CORRECTION SOFTWARE and steadfastly refuse to use it. If you are unable to hold pitch either vocally or instrumentally, practice until you can, or like Bob, find a listenable style that doesn't call for good pitch. I know that the Cher/Kanye West robotic vocal thing is really, really cool, but it's been done now and copying what was done several years ago by someone else first isn't really that cool today. Do something different. Learn to sing in tune.
7) Now I will tell you something that I will do for you AT NO ADDITIONAL COST as long as my schedule permits. If you will contact me as soon as you begin to consider utilizing my services I will come a reasonable distance and advise you as to what skills I think you should be working on to make your recording project go as quickly, smoothly and economically as possible (if you're a considerable distance away I recommend phone or email consultation and I may have to request mileage).
*Two sadly true stories:
Story #One
A young woman called me on the phone one day and asked "How much does it cost to make a demo?" I answered that there were many possible answers to that question depending upon how extensive a project she had in mind so she should come in and talk to me. She came in the following day and it became rapidly apparent that although she had a modicum of talent that she had sustained a brain injury sometime in the past and was probably not entirely competent to make decisions involving her small fixed income. She told me that she had been talking to a guy in the nearby mid-southern city who had moved there from California where he had been "in the music business" and who had moved to the nearby city to help people get started in the music business. His fee was $2500 for "the whole works" and he would do it all on his computer. He would use all his connections to promote the music but there would come a point where he would have to "back off" and let her finish the job. My guess is that he would back off about the time the check cleared the bank, but then, I always have been a bit skeptical.
Story #2
I saw a story in the local paper of the same small town a headline: "Local Man Makes Inroads in Country Music". A few days later I got a call from the guy and he wanted to come in and check out my facility. He came in and told me his story. He'd seen an ad in a songwriter's publication for "The Music City Songwriter's Collaborative" or somesuch. Sounds like an eleemosynary institution, doesn't it? Well, the deal was come in with your songs and for a mere $1500 per song, we'll have a group of studio musicians arrange & record them & then we'll put them on a CD collection that will be sent out to country radio stations all over the USA and every time one of your songs is played you'll get money from BMI! The fellow had with him a copy of "The BlaBla Report of Independent Country Music Releases" and lo and behold, not one but ALL THREE of the songs that he had had recorded at The Music City Songwriter's Collaborative were moving up the charts of "The BlaBla Report of Independent Country Music Releases". And not only that, but so were most of the other people on the same CD collection! Man, that collaborative sure has some influence in the country music world! Or...the BlaBla Report was owned by the same ex-husband of the second cousin of the washed up country singer who owned the Music City Songwriter's studio. Last I heard the small-town guy was getting ready to mortgage his home to get more money for The Collaborative.
Technically these people perpetrating what I believe are scams are not lying, but in my mind what they are doing is morally wrong. Nobody who has connections in the music business is going to relocate from California to a podunk city in the middle South to "help people". And though the people at The Collaborative were competent journeyman musicians and probably WERE going to send out a CD collection to a number of radio stations, every radio station gets a hundred of these CDs a week and most likely they go directly into the trash. At $1500/song and 15 songs to a CD that's $22,500 income for a day's work at The Collaborative. I'll bet the overhead is nowhere near that.